Banking Blog

Although the flood of bank failures has slowed somewhat since the financial crisis, the FDIC has still been forced to shut down 120 banks already in 2011. Thanks to the FDIC, account holders whose deposits totaled less than $250,000 at those banks didn’t lose a dime. But the safety and soundness of a bank is

Last week, Dealbreaker published a photo of a bank ATM receipt for a $400 withdrawal tossed on the ground outside a Capital One Bank in East Hampton, N.Y. So what made the receipt newsworthy? Other than a savings account balance of nearly $100 million, not much. Dealbreaker alleged hedge-fund manager David Tepper was the lucky

Five prominent consumer advocacy groups have banded together to protest a federal agency’s decision to ignore a significant new law intended to help clean up the regulatory mess that contributed to the U.S. financial meltdown several years ago. In a lengthy letter to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Center for

You may have never heard of preemption, but that one little word could have a big effect on whether state banking regulators can protect consumers when large national banks act badly. Preemption is the idea that federal regulations should always supersede state ones when they conflict, even when federal regulations are weaker. During the run-up

More female small-business owners are funding their businesses with credit cards and personal savings, instead of or in addition to long-term bank financing. That’s one finding of a new survey of U.S. female owners released by PNC Financial Services Group, a banking and financial services institution in Pittsburgh. The survey found that 59 percent of

The Federal Reserve Board this week issued its final rule establishing an interchange rate of 24 cents for debit card transactions and implementing related requirements of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The final rule came out with the usual flurry of doom-and-gloom press statements on both sides of the debate, plus

Government agencies expend a lot of time and money coming up with definitions. These exercises might seem silly until a seemingly obvious term like, say, “bank” gets caught up in some sort of enforcement, prosecution or civil action. Then, the official definition suddenly becomes a serious matter, indeed. A current example concerns the term “nonbank,”

Since I last reported on the Citigroup data breach, the bank has admitted that the number of customers affected was around 360,000, about 80 percent more than they originally reported. These types of revelations are now pretty commonplace after data breaches, as firms burned by hackers often prioritize damage control over truthful disclosure. Of course,

The Federal Reserve has apparently been swayed by banking industry criticism of its proposed 12 cent cap for debit swipe fees, also known as debit interchange fees. After a hard and sustained lobbying campaign by large and small banks and credit unions, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors today voted to finalize a version of

The politicians who crafted and ultimately passed the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill last year made some big promises about how the law would boost safety and soundness at America’s biggest banks, but the biggest blow for bank safety and soundness may have been struck in Basel, Switzerland this week. From Huw Jones at Reuters: Global

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